It was early morning chow time in the 1st Battalion’s rear area mess hall, and as Marines fresh in from the field were shoveling down their breakfasts — sausage, cold pancakes and greenish-hued scrambled eggs — CNN’s Larry King came on the flickering big-screen TV in the corner. King announced that the subject of his show was, once again, the ongoing prisoner- abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib.

And one Marine probably spoke for most Marines here when he shouted at the TV: “Aw, shut the (blank) up!”

The Marines here aren’t directly connected to the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal. Although these Marines routinely detain and do the initial processing of suspected insurgents, the handling of prisoners at the prison was and is a U.S. Army operation. And given the generations-old rivalry between Marines and soldiers, these Marines express no surprise when the Army stumbles into a minefield, literally or figuratively.

But some of the Camp Pendleton-based Marines here do worry that people back home may not make such a distinction, that all U.S. forces will be painted with the same abusive brush. And while every Marine interviewed condemned the abuse of prisoners, almost to a man they think the news media is overhyping the story and losing sight of the big picture of what’s going on in Iraq.

“I’m tired of it,” says Chief Warrant Officer David Bednarcik, 36, of Temecula. “(The news media) are making us look like a bunch of goons over here. What those (Army) yo-yos did was wrong, and if they’re guilty, they deserve to get crushed.

“But do we really need to keep going on and on and on about it? Can’t anybody talk about some of the positive things we’re doing here?”

Other Marines think there’s a double standard at work, that in the news media the smaller crimes of Americans are overwhelming the greater crimes of what the Marines call “the bad guys.”

“What (the prison guards) did was wrong,” says Lance Cpl. Michael Ferguson, 22, of Palm Beach, Fla. “But how many prisoners did we cut the heads off of?” — a reference to the videotaped beheading of U.S. citizen Nicholas Berg by suspected terrorists.

Some Marines think the fallout from the scandal will make their mission more difficult and more dangerous. Already, there have been changes in the way Marines handle detainees, or PUCs — pronounced “pucks,” short for “persons under control.”

For example, putting hoods over prisoners’ heads is out, replaced by blindfolds or military-style goggles with the lenses painted black. And intentional sleep deprivation — something every Marine is personally familiar with from boot camp — is now officially prohibited as a means of making suspected insurgents more susceptible to interrogation.

That worries Marines who are under constant danger from shadowy insurgents.

“I got on the Internet the other day and I saw some politician was saying our interro gation methods were too harsh,” “But he’s not over here.

“I’ve had buddies killed and wounded,” adds Hill, who was himself slightly wounded in the leg by shrapnel during a battle in Fallujah.

“I think a lot of people have no realization how (these restrictions) affect us,” says Lance Cpl. Travis Hill, 21, of Marysville, Wash. “I’m not saying we need to seriously abuse people, but we need to be able to get information from these (captured insurgents) to protect other Marines.”

Still, for all the concerns, there are some who manage to see a slim silver lining to the prisoner-abuse scandal.

“Unlike in a lot of other countries, we will root this out, and justice will be meted out swiftly and surely,” says Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne, 42, commander of the 1st Battalion. “It shows we’re a big enough country to say that this is wrong.”

Gordon Dillow, a former Register columnist, is reporting from Iraq as a free-lancer. He is embedded with Marines from Camp Pendleton. Dillow’s reports air on KNX radio (1070 AM) weekdays at 3:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. Special to the Laguna Niguel News Visitors: Iraqi women get checked Tuesday by a U.S. Marine as they wait outside the prison in Abu Ghraib, on the outskirts of Baghdad, Iraq, demanding to see their relatives inside the prison.

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